Mastering The Phones: The 3 Cs of Phone Skills Mastery (PART 4)

TRANSCRIPT: The third and final C of phone skill mastery is Control. Control can only come after you have a mastery of the material (Competence), and a solid belief in your abilities (Confidence). To say this point clearly – you cannot stay in control of a phone call unless you know precisely what you are going to say, and you feel good about saying it.

Without the first two C’s, prospects will continue to take you off message as they bleed you for just enough information to eliminate you from the process. When the prospect keeps control of the call they can manipulate the salesperson or BDC agent into helping them eliminate your company or product from their consideration set. See, one less dealer, one less salesperson, right? Whatever it is.

People who call on the phone are not necessarily looking to buy from you as much as they are looking to eliminate you. Maybe they’ve narrowed it down to two or three choices. They are waiting for you to say the right thing so they CAN buy from you, but they are just as happy if you eliminate yourself. When you don’t stay in control of the call, you make it easy for them to eliminate you and your company.

When you keep control of the phone call you are able to guide the prospect down an abbreviated road to the sale that starts with setting a firm appointment that shows. When you are in control, your successful phone calls generally last no longer than three minutes. Your calls should be short and will be short when you are in control.

Why short calls? Listen, when a client hires me to correct their poor phone results, you know what I do? I go to their recorded phone calls and I listen to their calls that are eleven minutes and longer. These are the absolute worst. These calls sound pleasant, right? The person on the company side sounds really happy and pleasant to the customer on the other side, who also sounds pleasant and happy. They are happy because the customer service agent, or the salesperson or the BDC agent is being super helpful. Sometimes they even sound satisfied with all the help they are providing. Unfortunately, calls that last eleven minutes or more mean only one thing: it means information vomiting, and the only reason your salespeople are vomiting information on every prospect is that they have no control over the call.

See, it’s like they are in a friendly tennis match with the prospect where both sides keep volleying the ball back and forth; customer question, salesperson answer, customer question, salesperson answer, rinse, lather, repeat. It goes on and on. You have to stop this madness. This is not a tennis match and you are not getting paid for information.

Maintaining control of the call is the only way to successfully set appointments that show. Finish each statement with a word track that strongly asks for the appointment, “I have two test drives open on that vehicle this afternoon. I’ve got a 2:45 and a 3:15. Which one works better for you?” Or, whatever your goal of the call is, make sure you end with some statement like “I’ve got two,” that strongly asks for the appointment.

If you don’t finish with your goal every time on every question that you answer, you’ll just keep answering more questions. Of course, without control, you’re just an ‘old school’ 411 operator. If you’re under 30 years old, it means you’ve become Google for the prospect.

If you are in sales, you don’t get paid for information.

So, are the 3 C’s really that important? Yeah. See, the reason the 3 C’s of salesperson mastery are so important is that there are two facts about buyers that are critical to remember: 1) you cannot sell an empty seat. That means we need someone to come into our business in order to sell them, and, 2) the prospect really wants to buy. They just need your help to get them past their fear of being sold.

Properly developing all 3 C’s to phone skill mastery is critical if your goal is to put more butts in your showroom seats, and not just for the 72 hours following some expensive phone skills training